DVD of the Week: The Passenger

More or less the entire career of Michelangelo Antonioni can be summed up, a bit too easily and yet not wrongly, by a single word: alienation. What makes his depiction of it important is, of course, his invention of distinctive styles of image and performance to embody it—plus one more thing: the particular kind of alienation he devoted his career to is the one that was most crucial to his times, the kind resulting from the rise of mass media.

On Saturday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center screens Antonioni’s “L’Avventura,” from 1960; it’s the film in which he brought to fruition the visual style that his subject invoked. (Pauline Kael’s capsule review is in the magazine this week.) Gregory Solman, in an informative essay from Senses of Cinema, tells a significant story of its reception at the Cannes Film Festival première, in 1960:

“A new man is being born…” Antonioni explained after L’avventura had been jeered and shouted down at its premiere in Cannes. “This new man immediately finds himself burdened with a heavy baggage of emotional traits which cannot exactly be called old and outmoded but, rather, unsuited and inadequate.”… At Cannes, Antonioni denounced eroticism in the popular art of his day as “a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time.”

In “L’Avventura,” modern architecture and the allure of a starlet are among the alienating factors. In the clip below, I discuss Antonioni’s 1975 drama “The Passenger.” Its French title, “Profession: Reporter,” gets to the heart of the matter: the main character, played by Jack Nicholson, is a journalist whose reporting alienates him from the world (even from nature) and from himself; the story runs on the sudden and drastic action he takes as a remedy.

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